


Medusa

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [12]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:30:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A gorgon who was, perhaps, beautiful once. Which is harder to live with, when you think about it.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Medusa

**Author's Note:**

> A gorgon who was, perhaps, beautiful once. Which is harder to live with, when you think about it.

_"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, roll up, roll up, and step this way! Yes, if you're interested in the weird and strange, if you crave the bizarre and frightening, you've come to the right place! Yes, step inside and see freaks from the darkest corners of the darkest countries in all the wide world! Roll up, pay the toll, step through the curtained gate, and you're there, my friends, in the presence of the freaks who haunted your childhood dreams, and I bet they haunt you still! Forget the pinheads, the mermaids, the wolf-children! Forget the boneless girl and the headless boy. You've seen all of those things before! Don't waste your dime on things that you've already seen. Pay here, pay me, and step through the door. Do it now. Don't miss the show! Roll up, roll up! Extinguish all smoking materials at the door. Forget what you think you know of the world. Roll up! Hurry, hurry, hurry, ladies and gentlemen. Come one, come all, and stand in her presence, if you dare!_

_You've seen the Bearded Lady! Now come see the Serpent Queen, the saddest girl in all the world!"_

*

Out of it all, out of all the wicked things that he's done and helped to be done, it's the eyes that haunt him worst and keep him up at night. They stare, sightless, bugged in their sockets and so dry that it seems as though he could touch them with one fingernail and they'd disintegrate into dust and take everything that they've seen with them. He needs no witnesses to what he’s done. This is a dark thing done quietly, between the two of them. A bargain, between him and her; a way to keep her, and keep her safe. Oh, the wicked things that he has done, when he was once his Baptist mother's Baptist son.

When he moves them he always expects them to be as light as air, husks, with all of the blood and strength sucked out of them to keep her warm. They weigh exactly as much as dead men should. Wrestling them into corners of the tent, he sweats through his shirt. They're a burden, but he can't bring himself to leave them behind in shallow graves outside of small towns where there's still a market for this particular kind of show. How much would it cost him to achieve the same in canvas and stuffing over a wood frame? How long until they might be found? So he puts them into shadowed corners, drapes them with cobwebs and surrounds their feet with rubber snakes. 

Hidden in plain sight.  
Safe and sound.

It had seemed that she was calling out to him, at the time.  
He found her in the desert, lying dormant like a stone. 

He keeps her. He feeds her. Love? Not love. Duty. Money. Things never change. He's kept her in the dark for so long that her eyes grew skin, and closed forever, and, dawn-blind, she waits for the next one. Something as old as her can count years like minutes. She presses herself against the dirt floor of the cage, her palms and cheek and breasts and belly and cunt, and she listens to the moving outside the canvas walls, and she waits for the next one. He'll send one. He always does. It's the promise that he made for her. She hears the rustle of the paper money as he folds it into his pockets. 

He needs her as much as she needs him. In the end.

The heat here is as terrible as it was in her youth, but wetter. The moisture in the air gets into her lungs and makes it harder to breathe. She was never amphibious. Her hair lies dull and lifeless, blunt against the dark dirt. She is still, and so are they. The insects that she catches when they skitter across the floor are barely enough to keep her alive between bigger meals. She swallows them whole, and they pull at the stitches in her throat as they squirm the way down into her belly. Sometimes, the ones who come to look at her throw cabbage leaves and spoiled fruit against the bars, things that stink of earth and rot. Khthon, she whispers. She forgets the exact meaning, but it had something to do with harvests and graves and the way that all living things must come to die. Persephone understood. In the dark, Medusa is her own grave. Her healed over eyes make no tears. Once upon a time, there was ritual sacrifice, and it was babies that they left in the holes in the earth for her to find. He won't steal babies though. They have to come to him on their own two feet, coins in their hands to pay their way to death, like Orpheus across the Styx.

Willing sacrifices. More or less.

Her forked tongue tickles the corners of her mouth and tastes the air. She tastes copper and shit and oil fumes. The whole fair moves on wheels from town to town, and, that way, they are never caught. There's a rat in the cage with her, somewhere, and she gropes for it. When she catches them, she swallows them whole. It reminds her of sex, her head thrown back, the undulation of breasts and throat as she forces it on down, and then the dead sleep that follows. 

She misses this one. She sucks at her lips for the taste of the last one, but there's barely anything there.

Outside, the shouting starts again. In the old days, the good bad days when she was Guardian and Protector and Queen, there were prayers. She doesn't understand the words now, but she wonders if the meaning might be the same. In her youth, with her golden hair, she had genuflected on the floors of the temple, made her offerings to Athena in flowers and sweet incense. How was she to know that all of that could be ended by warm arms and kind words and the scent of the sea clinging in the coils of the great god's hair? How could she have known that someone would see if she fucked Him on the altar, and how terrible the cost of that would be? All these years, she's been waiting for the end of the end. She counts off the days with score marks in the clotted dirt.

Some deaths take longer than others.

Something changes. A cockroach skitters across her face and up over her open-closed eye. It's just trying to get away from the light. She presses her ear to the floor and listens to the trembling of footsteps in the dirt, the heartbeat transmitted through the throb of the blood in the soles of the feet. She can't see, but she knows what's happening. 

How long have they been doing this? How long has there been a mirror hanging on a convenient hook? How many boys have there been with fine golden hair. In her youth, her hair was golden too, where now it hisses and spits. There'll be no sword. They don't carry swords anymore. He seemed a very young man on that day when he found her in the desert and all of this began. When he delivered her to this.

What one god takes away, another finds a way to give. Gods are even jealous of each other.  
If nothing else, she's learned how long it takes for things to change. 

Slowly, she sits up, but she keeps the palms of both hands pressed against the floor, the better to feel him with. She lifts her head and feels the whisper of a hundred forked tongues against her cheek. She whispers to them, and tells them to be patient. Obligate, she needs meat to thrive. They come to her like babies, toddling, their eyes unfocused. They pay their pennies and come willingly into her chamber. They see her blindness, and don't realise how quickly she can move. They see the bars and don't realise how far her skinny arms can reach. A bead of venom forces past the rim of one blind eye and trickles warmly down her cheek. She wants him so much that she can taste it. Three hundred and sixty four scratches in the shit and the dirt. In the old days, they dug holes like graves and left the babies there for her, with words of ritual. They placated her with blood, kept her at bay with tender flesh, easier to swallow whole, until their hero could make his way up to her mountain with mirror and sword.

Old story. Unsatisfying.

A long time ago, years ago, now, when he first painted the sign, he'd read it to her.

WARNING: ONLY LOOK AT HER IN THE MIRROR.

Perseus had his shield, convex, distorting, and he'd cut himself as often as he cut her. His blood had been bitter with piss and vinegar, but this one smells very sweet. One a year is what he gives her. More than that, and the bodies might be noticed. There's three hundred days in the year, give or take when their wheels aren't rolling, so that's one in thirty thousand, and not so high a price to pay for her obedience and love. It's easy enough to cover, with the young men always leaving home in these modern days, never to return and, anyway, they're always moving on. He brings them along until they start to disintegrate. She knows because she can smell them, dusty in the dark. Like earth. _Khthon_ , they said, because even beautiful things must eventually come to rot beneath the earth. She has grave-dirt caked under her fingernails. 

What people don't remember that the Gorgons and the Sirens shared a mother in Demeter, who had her hands always buried in the earth to make the green things grow. Sisters shared and, in the dark, the years and years of dark, she taught herself to sing in harmony with herself, a hundred and one flickering forked tongues, song that wrecked the ships upon the rocks. She can't see, but she knows that he's watching her in the mirror, and she knows that men can't resist this song without a mast to bind themselves to. He'll turn. He has to. He doesn't have a choice. The shouting outside gets louder, the barker drawing in a crowd to fill his pockets with pennies and dimes, enough to make them rich for another year. She doesn't have much time, before they come in here to find another one made stone and dust, so much set dressing, but not before she has his blood to warm her. There'll be another one through the door any minute, come to see the Serpent Queen, saddest girl in all the world, with her blind eyes and her poison tears. 

It won't take long, though. She's greedy, after waiting for so long.

She sits still, dead still, while he reaches through the bars to touch her. His skin gives off such warmth. She hums to him, a lullaby, designed to rock him down into death. She kisses his palm, her forked-tongue flickering, and then she looks up, no sword or shield to protect him, and the last thing he sees is the warm tears on her face and he smiles as his heart turns to stone and stops beating like anything living.

*

Another moving day, so he battens down the hatches. The idea amuses him even if he’s never seen open water. He’s a desert child, born in the middle of the dust bowl; his father preached about snakes and stones. He wrestles them into the corner of the cart, all of the bodies together, four dead men roped into a raft. He’s long since stopped about how many men came before them. With the constant to-and-fro, they don’t last very long before they return to dust and sift away into the desert. He shifts his weight, feels the floor crackle underneath him. Bones make grainy dust, like sand. Sitting in the corner of the cage, back against the bars, she sifts it through her grey fingers and he has to turn away. He can’t stand to sit and watch her playing, rubbing dead men into her skin like fine face powder.

In the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep, what he thinks about is this: how long will it be before it’s him they find, with not a drop of blood in him? How long before she takes him while he’s sleeping, or when he’s not wary? He thinks about that, and he wonders how long a thing like her could live.

One in every thirty thousand, that’s not bad odds. But without him to control her?

Perhaps if God’s kind, he’ll drop dead within reach of the bars, and that’ll be an end to it. Maybe his sin will poison her, and she’ll lie down and die too, if God’s kind. If God could ever be so kind to a man like him. How long could a thing like her survive, anyway?

In the middle of the night, it seems to him like there could be no worse fate than to lie awake in the dark and think about the things that he has done, when he was once his Baptist Mother’s Baptist son.


End file.
